Off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city, there is a slum called Makoko that suffers from occasional flooding. Now this neglected area could go from shantytown to a city of the future.

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Residents are starting to build on the water.

According to Architectizer:

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The usual approach to building in a flood zone is to put everything on stilts, as many residents of Rockaway, Queens, are considering in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. That’s also been the approach in the slum settlement of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria, where many residents live in illegal wood shanties propped up on stilts, accessible only by canoe. Recently the slum and its population of roughly 250,000 Nigerians have been a target of a government that sees the settlement as an eyesore and an impediment to Lagos’s metamorphosis into a modern megacity of 40 million. Last summer the government went on an anti-slum campaign, sending out forces to cut the houses’ stilts with machetes.

But the Nigerian-born, Netherlands-based architect Kunlé Adeyemi sees potential in the lagoon as a future site of a sustainable floating community. For his opening gambit, Adeyemi and his firm, NLÉ, are putting the finishing touches on a three-story, 2,300-square-foot floating school for 100 students between the ages of 4 and 12. Constructed from locally sourced wood and a base of 256 used plastic drums, the new school features enclosed classrooms on the second level and an open-air classroom on the third floor, all anchored by a waterside playground and green space. The Makoko school, which held a preview celebration earlier this month, completes the first phase of NLÉ’s plan to erect a livable city on the lagoon.

Here is the school, as it's being constructed. Read more on Architectizer.

This is exactly the kind of city design I hope to see more of in the coming decades.